I get it. Your first thought is: “It’s been 80 degrees all week, & the forecast says it will be 80 degrees all of next week, too. I’m not worried about the heat, I’m worried about the A/C!”
First rule of thumb: It’s Arkansas. Ever heard “If you don’t like the weather, wait 5 minutes”? No offense to any meteorologists, but that’s a tough gig, & people make mistakes!
Here is some other general advice: You should always try to check your mechanical systems before you have to absolutely & wholly depend on them for your comfort.
Hopefully, you have a trustworthy commercial HVAC company who has been following a detailed planned maintenance plan year-round. Realistically, I know some of you haven’t. You wait until something breaks, & you call a buddy of yours to “fix it”. That’s one way to live life!
OK, so you wait until the temperature drops to 30 degrees before you realize your heat is out. Bummer. When dealing with large commercial equipment, often times the specific part that your unit(s) need is not in stock, meaning they have to be ordered. That could mean a day or two, or that could mean a couple of weeks, it really is a case by case basis. But, if you find out now, you may not have to be desperate enough to pay for the expedited shipping, because you’re ahead of the game. Translation: $ SAVINGS $.
Also, if you find out now that 50% of your heat is not working, no one has even noticed, no one has been uncomfortable. We have time to lay out a plan, discuss your options, & get any/all issues corrected in a timely manner, so that when your heat does need to be kicked on, most people will never have any idea that they almost had to wear ear muffs in the office! Translation: COMFORT
I hope that your building/office/place of worship has absolutely no heating issues, I really do. But you should let a company like Gibbs Service let you know that. Don’t assume because you didn’t have issues last year, that your heat is fine. With age comes rust, wear & tear, and more. Just because the coin landed on heads last time you flipped it, doesn’t mean it’s going to again!
I want to leave you with one last important cautionary piece of advice, and some real evidence.
If your unit has gas heat, there are dangerous carbon monoxide chemicals that are being discharged into the air, so they don’t get into your building, which would obviously cause an extremely dangerous situation, for obvious reasons. Did you know that heat exchangers can eventually rust to the point where they develop holes/leaks? That means that the dangerous gases can be pumped into your building. By law, when we come across one, we have to shut the heat off, for safety reasons. Maybe you’re thinking, “But how often does that happen?”
The pictures attached are real examples we see this time of year. In this particular case, a place of worship had not been performing any sort of planned maintenance on their HVAC units, they had just been fixing them as they broke down. Not surprisingly, they have had a lot of hot summers & cold winters in year’s past. We were able to get them on a new planned maintenance schedule. Since it’s October, the first thing we did was perform a heat check on all of their units. We found that 44% of their units had major issues that had to be repaired before the unit could provide heat. Can you imagine how uncomfortable it would be for you to go to worship, and to have slightly more than half of the buildings heated! Burr! Luckily, these issues are going to be addressed by us long before the heat kicks on. So, what that means, is that for the hundreds of people who will be filing in on the weekends for the remainder of the year, they’ll never know what it’s like to be cold inside the building. They’ll be comfortable, Just the way we like it.
Take a look at the pictures below, and let me know if you see any holes…
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